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North America's Oldest Known Pterosaur
Smithsonian-Led Team Discovers North America’s Oldest Known Pterosaur New Fossils Unearthed in Petrified Forest National Park Bonebed Preserve a Snapshot of an Ecosystem in Flux Before the End Triassic Mass Extinction Media Contact A Smithsonian-led team of researchers have discovered North America’s oldest known pterosaur, the winged reptiles that lived alongside dinosaurs and were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight. In a paper published today, July 7, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers led by paleontologist Ben Kligman, a Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, present the fossilized jawbone of the new species and describe the sea gull-sized pterosaur alongside hundreds of other fossils—including one of the world’s oldest turtle fossils—unearthed at a remote bonebed in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona.
These fossils, which date back to the late Triassic period around 209 million years ago, preserve a snapshot of a dynamic ecosystem where older groups of animals, including giant amphibians and armored crocodile relatives, lived alongside evolutionary upstarts like frogs, turtles and pterosaurs. “The site captures the transition to more modern terrestrial vertebrate communities where we start seeing groups that thrive later in the Mesozoic living alongside these older animals that don’t make it past the Triassic,” Kligman said. In 2011, a team co-led by research geologist Kay Behrensmeyer, the National Museum of Natural History’s curator of vertebrate paleontology, braved the area’s rugged badlands, which are home to rattlesnakes and wild horses.
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